Pug’s Place

I spent ~8.5 hours yesterday in Norman Hall’s computer lab on a G5 with Final Cut Pro editing, silently cursing, wiring, converting, and finally burning two films: a little ditty titled “What is Free Culture” and another change of “Pizza Delivery Jedi.”

Pizza Delivery Jedi
This was one set of changes, exactly as I described yesterday morning: the removal of all but two of the lightsabre clashes. Now there’s one clash effect in the fight between Crumu and Vengef (where the sound effect indicates there should be one, and it looks *much better* than the old ones did) and one in the last melee where Crumu strikes the ground (since he should be fusing that sand into glass).
I’ve already re-encoded the whole movie into its various formats and have uploaded the changed copies to Archive.org. I’ll post when they’re on-line so you can all go and download it yet again.
What is Free Culture
Gavin Baker, the president of Florida Free Culture asked me to put together a short video to the tune of Electric Frankenstein’s “New Rage” to serve as some eye-candy and show a taste of what the Free Culture movement means by ‘having a participatory culture.’ This is intended to be shown at the first meeting of the Florida chapter of the group. I did not, however, get much direction on what to put into this video, so I just found some creative commons/public domain licensed video on Archive.org that I liked, took it in yesterday morning and started mashing stuff together.
Like most video projects I’ve done in the past 5 years, I’m not particularly proud of it, but I ran out of editing time (bastards at Norman close at 5 pm on Fridays…) and definitely will not have time to re-edit the film before the meeting on Thursday. I made up all the text on the fly, which is why it seems so disjointed. Hell, I’m lucky that there aren’t any mispellings… But it’s made, it’ll show on Thursday, and it should serve its purpose well so long as it is adequately introduced anywhere it is played.
I’ve already encoded it in various formats (told Ressy to take care of that while I slept, she said she would and told me to get to bed, and lo - all encoded and named properly upon my waking up), and I’ve submitted it to Archive.org as well. It should go on-line soonish, but the placeholder page with all of the information is already on-line.

I’ll post again when both videos get approved and you can see what I was up to all day yesterday
As to what I was up to last night… well, James and I met E. and April at her place, watched some Futurama and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade whilst eating Pizza and quaffing Mountain Dew. Huzzah!